Lawsuit: City property-tax system illegal

Skeptical that Mayor Nutter and City Council will ever muster the political courage to repair Philadelphia's long-broken property-tax system, a group of tax-overhaul advocates and property owners is suing to force the city to adopt a new, equitable set of property values.

The lawsuit, filed in Common Pleas Court late Friday, asks the court to declare the city's property-tax system illegal and force the city to establish a new system.

It also seeks to cancel the 10 percent property-tax increase passed in 2010 and issue refunds to those who may have already paid at the higher rate.

The Nutter administration agrees that the system is broken and says it is working to fix it. But the lawsuit, led by two veteran tax activists, argues that city politicians are stalling, afraid of a backlash from middle-class voters whose property taxes will jump dramatically when the assessments are fixed.

The lead plaintiff is Brett Mandel, whose property-tax bill would probably at least double under a corrected system. The other 17 include owners of residential and commercial properties from all over the city.

"We have put forward the policies. We have said, 'Pretty please.' Now we have to do what is right, and just, and legal. And if you don't, there's going to be a consequence," said Mandel, a former candidate for city controller who sat on the 2003 Tax Reform Commission and had threatened to sue the city over property assessments since 2008.

Since his days on City Council, Nutter has been pushing to fix the city's broken property assessments. He played a key role in pushing a public vote last year that took the job of setting property values away from the dysfunctional Board of Revision of Taxes, following an Inquirer series on the agency's mismanagement and cronyism. After a legal fight, the seven-member BRT remains in place, but for appeals only.

A new Office of Property Assessments is in charge of setting the numbers, but city officials have said the job of fixing them will take at least two years.

"Honestly, you're not going to do a reassessment overnight if you're going to do it right," said Richie McKeithen, the city's new top assessor.

That's too long for the property owners and their lawyer Kenneth L. Metzner, an ordained minister from South Philadelphia and a leading critic of the BRT.